This is a very light-weight production about a serious topic with a lot of dubious lines and scenes.
Instead of spending a lot of time on interesting topics like the story of Bela and the toddlers and the individual psychological damage and treatment of other camp survivors, more time is spent on the scenes with the Scottish football coach and the training for a match at the end.
There are many dubious scenes which are likely to be untrue to the story and unhelpful to a film advertised as showing authentic history. The list below contains some dubious scenes.
1. It is very unlikely that the camp survivors spoke one language: in the film it is Polish. The camps were a Tower of Babel. Yiddish was a common lingua franca, but Hungarian, Russian, and many others would be heard. There are signs in Hebrew, but Modern Hebrew was not widely understood in the Jewish diaspora until well after the formation of the state of Israel.
2. We are all familiar with the images of gaunt, half-starved survivors, yet the Jewish boys in this film are all oddly beefy, muscular types who can easily overpower the feeble English youths. 3. Perversely, the English youths are portrayed as anti-immigrant hooligans who taunt the Jewish boys with Nazi salutes.
3. Rationing for clothing did not end in Britain until 1949, and food rationing only ended in 1954, yet the English teenage girls are shown as buxom Essex-girl types in gaudy dresses who like to hang around smiling and winking at the muscular Jewish camp survivors. Ironically, food rationing ended in Germany in 1950.
4. Very oddly, one of the Jewish boys is portrayed as a girl-hungry type of lad who is eager to learn English to chat up the local girls. He is not meant to be an American GI - over sexed and over here: he is a traumatized youth who has lost his family in the Holocaust. 5. The girls and boys did not come straight from the concentration camps and they were certainly not in the notorious striped uniforms. Their clothing seemed quite acceptable, yet, on arrival the girls and boys have to strip together and their clothing is burned. The bizarre thing is that they are not given any other clothing for about a third of the film. One teenage girl, Sala Feiermann, is seen for a large part of the film, in the company of boys, romping about both the camp and also the village in only her pristine camisole and 1940s French knickers. Even today that would traumatise many girls, but in 1940s Britain, that would caused more than a stir.
6. The most disturbing dubious scene, is when a boy Jewish survivor dumps his Jewish girlfriend, Sala Feiermann, also a Holocaust survivor, with the sexual innuendo that she will quickly find another boy because they all know what girls did to survive in the camps. Not only is this a slur on all female survivors, in addition there has never been any reliable evidence that sexual favours granted salvation in the camps.
Of course, even if it was not the norm, no matter how rare, the stories need to be heard. But this film does not achieve anything by glibly containing one causal nasty remark suggesting it was the norm. It was not the norm and sadly most Jewish women prisoners faced a worse, unavoidable fate. A one-off comment in a film like this, from a fellow male survivor, is a form of victim blaming or slut shaming. If these incidents were able to take place, surely the female is as much a victim as the man who steals bread from another prisoner? The film should have shown the same degree of compassion, if its ambit was to show how victims recovered.
Instead of spending a lot of time on interesting topics like the story of Bela and the toddlers and the individual psychological damage and treatment of other camp survivors, more time is spent on the scenes with the Scottish football coach and the training for a match at the end.
There are many dubious scenes which are likely to be untrue to the story and unhelpful to a film advertised as showing authentic history. The list below contains some dubious scenes.
1. It is very unlikely that the camp survivors spoke one language: in the film it is Polish. The camps were a Tower of Babel. Yiddish was a common lingua franca, but Hungarian, Russian, and many others would be heard. There are signs in Hebrew, but Modern Hebrew was not widely understood in the Jewish diaspora until well after the formation of the state of Israel.
2. We are all familiar with the images of gaunt, half-starved survivors, yet the Jewish boys in this film are all oddly beefy, muscular types who can easily overpower the feeble English youths. 3. Perversely, the English youths are portrayed as anti-immigrant hooligans who taunt the Jewish boys with Nazi salutes.
3. Rationing for clothing did not end in Britain until 1949, and food rationing only ended in 1954, yet the English teenage girls are shown as buxom Essex-girl types in gaudy dresses who like to hang around smiling and winking at the muscular Jewish camp survivors. Ironically, food rationing ended in Germany in 1950.
4. Very oddly, one of the Jewish boys is portrayed as a girl-hungry type of lad who is eager to learn English to chat up the local girls. He is not meant to be an American GI - over sexed and over here: he is a traumatized youth who has lost his family in the Holocaust. 5. The girls and boys did not come straight from the concentration camps and they were certainly not in the notorious striped uniforms. Their clothing seemed quite acceptable, yet, on arrival the girls and boys have to strip together and their clothing is burned. The bizarre thing is that they are not given any other clothing for about a third of the film. One teenage girl, Sala Feiermann, is seen for a large part of the film, in the company of boys, romping about both the camp and also the village in only her pristine camisole and 1940s French knickers. Even today that would traumatise many girls, but in 1940s Britain, that would caused more than a stir.
6. The most disturbing dubious scene, is when a boy Jewish survivor dumps his Jewish girlfriend, Sala Feiermann, also a Holocaust survivor, with the sexual innuendo that she will quickly find another boy because they all know what girls did to survive in the camps. Not only is this a slur on all female survivors, in addition there has never been any reliable evidence that sexual favours granted salvation in the camps.
Of course, even if it was not the norm, no matter how rare, the stories need to be heard. But this film does not achieve anything by glibly containing one causal nasty remark suggesting it was the norm. It was not the norm and sadly most Jewish women prisoners faced a worse, unavoidable fate. A one-off comment in a film like this, from a fellow male survivor, is a form of victim blaming or slut shaming. If these incidents were able to take place, surely the female is as much a victim as the man who steals bread from another prisoner? The film should have shown the same degree of compassion, if its ambit was to show how victims recovered.